Fantastic Metropolis

The world awaited the tick of the geologist’s hammer. All the days and years it had kept wombed inside it, like an agate’s milky lines orbiting its crooked shiny brilliant heart, could at last come to term. The fossils started gently yawning. Meteoric stones fled back towards the stars. Riddled limestone caves were healed of vacancy. The cliffs, wrapped in a tall white blindfold, strode into the waves. And the flints at last forgave their ancient quarry. It was my father—not my true father, but the earthly impostor—who came with the hammer to rouse the mineral world to its millennium: Robert Dadd, apothecary, first curator of the Chatham and Rochester Literary and Philosophical Institution. Proprietor of the Commercial and Mathematical School. Lecturer in chemistry and geology. Preacher of the age of science and enlightenment.

I am calm today, seated silently in my grey dittoes, gazing on my vivid companions, here in the male criminal wing of the Royal Bethlehem Hospital in St George’s Fields. They’ll let you call it Bethlehem or Bethlem, but not (unless you’d be restrained again) Bedlam. Still that’s what we call it in our hearts, and how the voices in the street endlessly baptise this screaming issue. Now the chains are gone which they fastened once around our arms and legs and necks; no longer are we displayed to the eyes of the town for their edification. But this is Bedlam still, though its masters and its warders have been kind to me, I who have often been so savagely unkind to others.

Bethlehem: a place I’d visited already and even made a picture of, a watercolour, near the Greek Convent of the Nativity of Christ. It was inside these walls that I finally perfected it. Bethlehem was finished inside Bedlam. That was the trip they say cost me my sanity. Those are the words of their language. I speak a different one: it was on that journey I was swallowed by the sun, when he had removed the veils of the sky from his nakedness and glory, and claimed me as his own. My brain has scorched with his light ever since. In the desert heat inside my skull, the scorpions mate. I record the fragile lines of music that their hairy legs make as they rub together.

Italy, Greece, Turkey. In Bodrum we visited the castle of St Peter and there sketched marble fragments from the tomb of Mausolus. See how antiquity can survive through the motions of one hand and eye. By now the sun would fall out of the sky in the evening, and was buried in the sea in minutes. Thence to Lycia, Cyprus, Beirut, Syria, Palestine. In Safed an old Jew was bent almost double in the synagogue, pondering the Kabbalistic mysteries and mumbling his litanies as though the years meant nothing, as though the years were no more than grains of dust gathering on his sandals. Tribesmen surrounded us in Jericho, one with a beard so infernally black, it would have made a hundred fine stiff brushes. Our dragoman dispelled their heat with a cascade of words. From Jaffa to Alexandria we were given passage on a ship named Hecate.

Then we travelled along the Nile, as though we were the limbs of Osiris once more, waiting to be gathered up. I drew each day as Thebes grew closer, and Sir Thomas fired away at crocodiles with his long gun. Later, as we moored near the temples of Luxor, we went up on deck one night to find the crew—Egyptian and Nubian—circling the desert sand, chorusing themselves into a frenzy, while one chanted passages from the Koran. They would collapse finally under the brilliant moon, some of them foaming. The very next day the sun started to claim me for his own. Osiris. Old god, father of all newer ones. And that’s when the spirits were released to torment me.

Osiris held me in his own arms and burnt himself into my mind and body like a living brand. Sunstroke, they said. Those are the words of their language: I speak a different one. Once he had burnt away the dross that preceded him, and I had the mark of the god upon me, then the demons came to pleasure themselves, for they always follow the god about. I saw my own past, my counterfeit parentage, the years of lies, and I cut the mark from my forehead with a knife—the blotch they called a birthmark and I knew now was the devil’s footprint as he had walked over me in my cradle. Blood rose up like molten lava.

In Rome I saw at last the Pope’s true nature, and while he walked about before the abomination of St Peter’s, I fingered the knife under my cloak. God knows it was sharp enough, but there were too many guards for my mission to be accomplished. Sir Thomas came to fear me, sensing the power that is at the centre of our heavens as it shone inside me. Once I caught him out on deck, dicing with Death for my soul. Death the cold, the calculating, was showing him her white and drooping breast, and her garter glittered with the stillborn milk of pearls. I could easily have killed him then, but the time had not yet come.

How fearsome can the rage of the atoms be? My father taught chemistry like one who has unlocked the secret room, like the high priest entering the Holy of Holies. (Moses owed everything to the Egyptians. Before Yahweh ever was, Osiris is). I travelled alone back to London.

As the god commanded I lived on nothing but ale and eggs, scattering the shells about me on the floor as harbingers of life, the frail calcium walls that curve about the living genius. When they came for me, they found three hundred eggs, though this, like everything of true significance, was lost on them. Trinitarians! They wanted to lock me away but my father would not hear of it, so he took me into his own care, my father who understood above all things that understanding was forgiveness. His omnicompetent smile. I entreated him to travel with me back to Cobham, where I had first set eyes on Titian and Tintoretto, where I had seen for the first time how much paint can love flesh. And as we travelled, I beseeched him to tell me what the world was made of, and how it was constructed. He smiled the true and liberal smile of one who knows what is to be known, and started to explain things to me again, as though I might unaccountably have forgotten them—I who have never forgotten anything except the sound the tide makes when it laps the shore.